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			{{short description\|U.S. government study of UFOs}}
⚫	'''Project Sign''' was an official U.S. government study of ]s undertaken by the ] in ~~late~~ ~~1947~~.
			]

		⚫	'''Project Sign''' or '''Project Saucer''' was an official ] study of ]s (UFOs) undertaken by the ] (USAF) and active for most of 1948. It was the precursor to ].
	Sign was instigated following a recommendation from Lt. General ], then the head of ]. Just before this, Brig. Gen. ], of the ]s air intelligence division, had completed a preliminary review of the many UFO reports--then called “flying discs” by military authorities--which had received considerable publicity following the ] sighting of ] ]. Schulgen's study, completed in late July 1947, concluded that the flying discs were real craft. Schulgen then asked Twining and his command, which included the intelligence and engineering divisions located at ] (then ]), to carry out a more exhaustive review of the data.

			==History==
	In his formal letter to Schulgen on ] ], Twining concluded that (somewhat shortened):
			The project was established in 1948 by Air Force General ], head of the ], and was initially named Project SAUCER.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web\|title=CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 — Central Intelligence Agency\|url=https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/ufo.html\|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070613113822/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/ufo.html\|url-status=dead\|archive-date=June 13, 2007\|website=www.cia.gov\|access-date=2020-04-30}}</ref> The goal of the project was to collect, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to UFO sightings, on the premise that they might represent a national security concern.<ref name=":0" />

			On April 27, 1949, the U.S. Air Force publicly released a paper prepared by the Intelligence Division of the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio.<ref name=":1">Associated Press, Flying Discs Held No Joke, The Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), April 27, 1949, p. D13.</ref> The paper stated that while some UFOs appeared to represent actual aircraft, there was not enough data to determine their origin.<ref name="Blum1990">Blum, Howard, Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. Simon and Schuster, 1990</ref> Almost all cases were explained by ordinary causes, but the report recommended a continuation of the investigation of all sightings.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />
	* a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.

			Project Sign was first asserted in the 1956 book '']'' by retired Air Force Captain ] who later directed ]. In this he also claimed that ''Sign'' had produced an "Estimate of the Situation" which endorsed an interplanetary explanation for UFOs, but ], Chief of Staff of the Air Force, shut down Project Sign for lack of proof.<ref name="Ruppelt">{{cite book\|last=Ruppelt\|first=Edward J\|url=http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17346/pg17346-images.html\|title=The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects\|publisher=Doubleday & Company\|year=1960\|edition=2nd}}</ref> No copy of this document or any other corroboration of Ruppelt's claim has been produced, and '']'' called the report "probably more mythological than real".<ref>{{Cite web\|title=50 Years Ago, the Air Force Tried to Make UFOs Go Away. It Didn't Work.\|url=https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30257166/project-blue-book-anniversary/\|last=Banias\|first=M. J.\|date=2019-12-17\|website=Popular Mechanics\|language=en-US\|access-date=2020-05-03}}</ref>
	* b. There are objects probably approximately the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft.

			Project Sign was followed by Project Grudge after a conclusion was reached that UFO reports could be exploited by a foreign power to induce panic in the population and were therefore a military issue in the post-WW II, ] climate. This led Project Grudge to publicly disparage all UFO reports as the result of "a. Misidentifications of various conventional objects. b. A mild form of mass-hysteria and war nerves. c. Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetuate a hoax or to seek publicity. d. Psychopathological persons."<ref>{{Cite book\|title=Project Blue Book : the top secret UFO files that revealed a government cover-up\|others=Steiger, Brad\|year=2019\|isbn=978-1-59003-300-5\|location=Newburyport, MA\|oclc=1078162415}}</ref>{{Unreliable fringe source\|date=July 2022}}
	* c. There is the possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena, such as meteors.

			==Caldwell investigation==
	* d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.
			In May 1949, officers of Project Sign received a letter from an aeronautical company shareholder, who explained that the company had been building aircraft similar to the "flying saucers" which were then a popular topic in the press. This was during the UFO craze following ]'s reports of ] over ] and the ] that followed. The Air Force had canvassed for reports of flying saucers, and the shareholder apparently felt that inventor ]'s disk-rotor might explain them.

			Tracking down the leads, the team, accompanied by the Maryland Police, visited an abandoned farm in ] (outside Baltimore), where the damaged remains of Caldwell's disk-rotor aircraft were discovered. They also tracked down Driggers, who told them the story of the attempted flight in 1937–8. The team reported that the prototypes could not be responsible for the "flying saucer" reports that were being received from all around the country.<ref>Just old contraptions, "Flying Saucers" find proves false alarm, ''The Los Angeles Times'', August 21, 1949</ref>
	* e. The apparent common description of the objects is as follows: ...

			Photographs of the broken disk-rotor machine continue to appear in UFOs books to this day. They were often described as "crashed" flying saucers in earlier works, claiming it was one more example of the USAF being in possession of such vehicles. More recently they are normally connected with the claims that the ] had built working ] late in the war, lumped together with other disk-shaped aircraft like the ], ] and ], in an effort to demonstrate that such aircraft were both possible and well-researched.<ref name=saucers>{{cite web \|url=http://www.greyfalcon.us/An%20Aeronautical%20History%20of%20Flying%20Saucers.htm \|title=An Aeronautical History of Flying Saucers \|accessdate=2011-02-11 \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101217101425/http://greyfalcon.us/An%20Aeronautical%20History%20of%20Flying%20Saucers.htm \|archive-date=2010-12-17 \|url-status=dead }}</ref>
	* f. It is possible within the present U.S. knowledge... to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description ...

			==References==
	* g. Any development in this country along the lines indicated would be extremely expensive...
			{{reflist}}

			==Further reading==
	* h. Due consideration must be given to the following:
			*] (2002) ''UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941–1973''. ], {{ISBN\|1-57174-317-0}}
	:: (1) The possibility that these objects are of domestic origin - the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this command.
		⚫	*] (1994). ''Watch the Skies! - A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth''. ], {{ISBN\|1-56098-343-4}}.

	:: (2) The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects.

	:: (3) The possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion, possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge.

	He recomended that " ... Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and code name for detailed study of this matter.” (Clark, 489) Though conducted by the ], the study’s information and conclusions would be made available to all the armed services, and to scientific agencies with formal government ties.

	Twining’s suggestion was approved on ], and on ] ], Project Sign formally began its work at ], under the direction of Captain ]. Though it was classified “restricted”, the study’s existence was known to the general public, and was often called "Project Saucer". However, UFO historian Wendy Connors established, through an interview with a surviving Sign secretary, that "Project Saucer" was the project's original informal name and had started a year earlier in late 1946. If this was the case, then the Army Air Force had already begun investigation of UFOs well before the ] sighting that launched the first flood of UFO reports of June/July 1947 in the United States. (See, e.g., WWII ] UFOs)

	Studies were undertaken by Air Intelligence at the Air Force base nearest to any particular UFO report, though some cases were studied directly by ]. In order to sort out cases where witnesses had simply misidentified stars, clouds, planets or ]s, astronomer ] of ] was hired as a consultant, initally, to weed out cases where a witness had misidentified a mundane aerial phenemenon.

	Dr. ] writes that "The core personnel for the project were probably the most talented group to work on UFOs until the air force ended its investigation in 1969. Aiding chief officer, Capt. Robert R Sneider, were two outstanding aeronautical engineers, ] and ] ... Completing the group was nuclear and missiles expert ] ... The quality of these people indicates the seriousness (and the comparative difference in later years) with which the air force considered the flying disk problem." (Swords, p. 91)

	Sign’s first major undertaking was the study of a widely publicized UFO encounter known as the ]. On 07 January 1948, Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell--in pursuit an aerial artifact Mantell reportedly described as “a metallic object ... it is of tremendous size.” (Clark, 352)--died when his airplane crashed near ]. Project Sign investigators determined Mantell had been chasing the planet Venus--a conclusion met with widespread incredulity.

	According to later ] director ], Project Sign investigators were less skeptical about the Chiles-Whitted sighting over Montgomery, Alabama on ] ]. In this case, two airline pilots reported that a rocket-shaped UFO, glowing blue and seeming to emit reddish flames, approached them on a near-collision course. Pilots Chiles and Whitted reported the object appeared to show a double row of ports or windows emitting an intense bluish-white light. (A similar object with a double row of windows was also seen over ], ] a few days earlier and independently reported to Project Sign.) Some Sign researchers were deeply impressed by the close UFO sighting from two creditable pilot-witnesses. The reports of "windows" suggested the objects possibly were occupied.

	As Swords notes, "The project members reasoned that they had several dozen aerial observations that they could not explain, many of them by military pilots and scientists. The objects seemed to act like real technology, but their sources said they were not ours. The flying fuselage encounter (Chiles-Whitted) intrigued them. The ] of lift indicated that such an odd shape ''can'' fly, but it would need some form of power plant advanced well beyond what we could build (e.g., nuclear)." (Swords, p.93) Sign personnel generally accepted that the more reliable reports were describing accurately what they'd see. Given that there was no evidence that either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. had anything remotely like the UFOs reported, Sign personnel gradually began considering ] origins for the objects. The result was the legendary ].

	Swords argues that this consideration of non-earthly origin was "not as incredible in intelligence circles as one might think." Because many in the military were "pilots, engineers and technical people" they had a "'can do' attitude" and tended to regard unavailable technologies not as impossibilites, but as challenges to be overcome. Rather than dismissing UFO reports out of hand, they considered how such objects might fuction. This perspective, argues Swords, "contrasted markedly with many scientists characterizations of such concepts as impossible, unthinkable or absurd." (Swords, p93)

	One early hypothesis, favored by many Project Sign investigators, was that UFOs were new weapons or novel aircraft developed by the ]. However, Sign researchers could find no hard evidence supporting this hypothesis. With the emergence of cases like the Chiles-Whitted sighting, a rift developed within Sign’s staff between those who thought UFOs might be extraterrestrial (see the ] or ETH) and those who rejected this idea in favor of a more prosaic explanation.

	The ], reportedly drafted by certain Sign personnel including director Sneider, advanced the thesis that some of the UFOs investigated had non-earthly origins. Ruppelt reported in his book that "The Estimate" was sent up the Pentagon chain of command and eventually rejected by Air Force Chief of Staff General ], who cited a lack of physical evidence to support the extraterrestrial conclusion.

	With Gen. Vandenberg's rejection of The Estimate, Ruppelt said it was clear to the Sign personnel who supported ETH that there was no support at the top. Indeed, the faction which rejected ETH eventually came to dominate Project Sign. By late 1948, Project Sign was discontinued in name and replaced by a much more negatively oriented ].

	Ruppelt referred to the Project Grudge era as the "Dark Ages" of official Air Force UFO investigations. Still, by late 1949, some 20 percent of UFO sightings remained classified as “unknown” by Grudge. By late 1951, according to Ruppelt, some highly influential Pentagon generals had become so disenchanted with Grudge's debunking that Grudge itself was dismantled and replaced by ], with Ruppelt in charge.

	Historian ] argues that, overall, Project Sign’s personnel did an admirable job. However, “Its main problem was that the staff was too inexperienced to discriminate between which sightings to investigate thoroughly. Because of unfamiliarity with the phenomenon, the staff spent inordinate amounts of time on sightings that were obviously ], ]s or ]es.” (Jacobs, 47)

	==Sources==
	*Jerome Clark, ''The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial'', Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1578590299
	*David Michael Jacobs, ''The UFO Controversy In America'', Indiana University Press, 1975; ISBN 0253190061
⚫	* Curtis ~~Peoples~~, ''Watch the Skies! - A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth''. ], ~~1994, IBSN~~ 1-56098-343-4.
	*Edward J. Ruppelt, ''The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects'', Doubleday & Co., 1956
	*Michael D. Swords, "UFOs, the Military, and the Early Cold War" (pp. 82-122 in ''UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge'', David M. Jacobs, editor; University Press of Kansas, 2000; ISBN)

⚫	]

	==External links==		==External links==
	*		*
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			{{UFOs}}
			]
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			]

Latest revision as of 10:48, 11 April 2024

U.S. government study of UFOs

Project Sign or Project Saucer was an official U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) undertaken by the United States Air Force (USAF) and active for most of 1948. It was the precursor to Project Grudge.

History

The project was established in 1948 by Air Force General Nathan Farragut Twining, head of the Air Technical Service Command, and was initially named Project SAUCER. The goal of the project was to collect, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to UFO sightings, on the premise that they might represent a national security concern.

On April 27, 1949, the U.S. Air Force publicly released a paper prepared by the Intelligence Division of the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio. The paper stated that while some UFOs appeared to represent actual aircraft, there was not enough data to determine their origin. Almost all cases were explained by ordinary causes, but the report recommended a continuation of the investigation of all sightings.

Project Sign was first asserted in the 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by retired Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt who later directed Project Blue Book. In this he also claimed that Sign had produced an "Estimate of the Situation" which endorsed an interplanetary explanation for UFOs, but General Hoyt Vandenberg, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, shut down Project Sign for lack of proof. No copy of this document or any other corroboration of Ruppelt's claim has been produced, and Popular Mechanics called the report "probably more mythological than real".

Project Sign was followed by Project Grudge after a conclusion was reached that UFO reports could be exploited by a foreign power to induce panic in the population and were therefore a military issue in the post-WW II, Cold War climate. This led Project Grudge to publicly disparage all UFO reports as the result of "a. Misidentifications of various conventional objects. b. A mild form of mass-hysteria and war nerves. c. Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetuate a hoax or to seek publicity. d. Psychopathological persons."

Caldwell investigation

In May 1949, officers of Project Sign received a letter from an aeronautical company shareholder, who explained that the company had been building aircraft similar to the "flying saucers" which were then a popular topic in the press. This was during the UFO craze following Kenneth Arnold's reports of seeing UFOs over Mount Rainier and the Roswell Incident that followed. The Air Force had canvassed for reports of flying saucers, and the shareholder apparently felt that inventor Jonathan Edward Caldwell's disk-rotor might explain them.

Tracking down the leads, the team, accompanied by the Maryland Police, visited an abandoned farm in Glen Burnie, Maryland (outside Baltimore), where the damaged remains of Caldwell's disk-rotor aircraft were discovered. They also tracked down Driggers, who told them the story of the attempted flight in 1937–8. The team reported that the prototypes could not be responsible for the "flying saucer" reports that were being received from all around the country.

Photographs of the broken disk-rotor machine continue to appear in UFOs books to this day. They were often described as "crashed" flying saucers in earlier works, claiming it was one more example of the USAF being in possession of such vehicles. More recently they are normally connected with the claims that the Nazis had built working flying saucers late in the war, lumped together with other disk-shaped aircraft like the Avrocar, Sack AS-6 and Vought V-173, in an effort to demonstrate that such aircraft were both possible and well-researched.

References

^ "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 — Central Intelligence Agency". www.cia.gov. Archived from the original on June 13, 2007. Retrieved 2020-04-30.
^ Associated Press, Flying Discs Held No Joke, The Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), April 27, 1949, p. D13.
Blum, Howard, Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. Simon and Schuster, 1990
Ruppelt, Edward J (1960). The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (2nd ed.). Doubleday & Company.
Banias, M. J. (2019-12-17). "50 Years Ago, the Air Force Tried to Make UFOs Go Away. It Didn't Work". Popular Mechanics. Retrieved 2020-05-03.
Project Blue Book : the top secret UFO files that revealed a government cover-up. Steiger, Brad. Newburyport, MA. 2019. ISBN 978-1-59003-300-5. OCLC 1078162415.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
Just old contraptions, "Flying Saucers" find proves false alarm, The Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1949
"An Aeronautical History of Flying Saucers". Archived from the original on 2010-12-17. Retrieved 2011-02-11.

External links

Preceded byNone

US military projects investigating the UFO phenomenon

Succeeded byProject Grudge

UFOs

Ufology

Claimed sightings

General	List of reported UFO sightings Sightings in outer space
Pre-20th century	Ezekiel's Wheel (circa 622–570 BC) Airship of Clonmacnoise (740s) 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg 1566 celestial phenomenon over Basel 1665 celestial phenomenon over Stralsund José Bonilla observation (1883) Airship wave (1896–97) Aurora (1897)
20th century	Los Angeles (1942) Ängelholm UFO memorial (1946) Kenneth Arnold (1947) 1947 craze Flight 105 (1947) Roswell (1947) Rhodes (1947) Mantell (1948) Chiles-Whitted (1948) Gorman Dogfight (1948) Mariana (1950) McMinnville photographs (1950) Sperry (1950) Lubbock Lights (1951) Nash-Fortenberry (1952) Washington, D.C. (1952) Flatwoods monster (1952) Kelly–Hopkinsville (1955) Lakenheath-Bentwaters (1956) Antônio Villas Boas (1957) Levelland (1957) Barney and Betty Hill abduction (1961) Lonnie Zamora incident (1964) Solway Firth Spaceman (1964) Exeter (1965) Kecksburg (1965) Westall (1966) Falcon Lake (1967) Shag Harbour (1967) Jimmy Carter (1969) Finnish Air Force (1969) Pascagoula Abduction (1973) John Lennon UFO incident (1974) Travis Walton incident (1975) Tehran (1976) Petrozavodsk phenomenon (1977) Operação Prato (1977) Zanfretta incident (1978) Valentich disappearance (1978) Kaikoura Lights (1978) Robert Taylor incident (1979) Val Johnson incident (1979) Manises (1979) Cash–Landrum incident (1980) Rendlesham Forest (1980) Trans-en-Provence (1981) Japan Air Lines (1986) Ilkley Moor (1987) Voronezh incident (1989) Belgian UFO wave (1990) Ariel School (1994) Varginha (1996) Phoenix Lights (1997)
21st century	USS Nimitz UFO incident (2004) Campeche, Mexico (2004) O'Hare Airport (2006) Alderney (2007) Norway (2009) USS Theodore Roosevelt UFO incidents (2014) Jetpack man (2020–21) High-altitude object events (2023) David Grusch claims (2023)
Confirmed hoaxes	Maury Island hoax (1947) Twin Falls, Idaho hoax (1947) Aztec, New Mexico hoax (1949) Southern England (1967) Majestic 12 (1985) Gulf Breeze (1987–88) Alien Autopsy (1995 film) Morristown (2009)

Sightings by country

Types of UFOs

Types of alleged
extraterrestrial beings

Studies and timeline

Hypotheses

Conspiracy theories

Involvement

Abduction claims	History Entities Claimants Narrative Perspectives Insurance
Other	Implants Cattle mutilation Close encounter Contactee Crop circles Government responses GEIPAN Organizations Ufologists

Culture

Skepticism

Government & Law

Category

Categories:

Latest revision as of 10:48, 11 April 2024

History

Caldwell investigation

References

Further reading

External links